156 11111 00 W00 W00 W00 W00 Ways tays tays tays tays to Motivo Motivo Motivo Motivo Motivate Yate Yate Yate Yate Yourourourourourselfselfselfselfself
completion exercises. By asking his clients to write out
or speak six to 10 endings, quickly, without thinking, to
a “sentence stem,” he allows people to explore their own
minds for their hidden power and creativity.
A typical sentence he might ask you to complete six
to 10 times would be, “If I bring five percent more pur-
posefulness into my life today....”
Then you, the client, give your rapid endings to the
sentence. That’s how you find out what you think and
secretly know about your own power to add purpose to
your life. One of the fascinating aspects of Branden’s
sentences is the “five percent” part. It seems like an
awfully small amount of change when you look at it, but
think of how it would play out. If you brought five per-
cent more purposefulness to your life each day, it would
only be 20 days before you had doubled your sense of
purpose.
Huge things can be accomplished by focusing on one
small action at a time. Novelist Anne Lamott recalls an
incident in her childhood, the memory of which always
helps her “get a grip.”
“Thirty years ago,” she remembers, “my older
brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying
to get a report on birds written that he’d had three
months to write, which was due the next day. We were
out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the
kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder pa-
per and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobi-
lized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my fa-
ther sat down beside him, put his arm around my
brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just
take it bird by bird.’ ”
When we stay the same, it’s not because we didn’t
make a big enough change, but rather because we didn’t
do anything today that sent us moving toward change.